Workshops

Advanced Experiment & Research Design

Entrepreneurs are strongly biased towards action to overcome analysis paralysis. But such haste often leads to poorly designed experiments and poorly conducted research, both of which provide confusing or misleading data that leads to bad decisions, or even back to the paralysis of indecision we were trying to avoid.

Business Model Risk Prioritization

All innovation projects come with risks, and successful businesses know how to navigate them. This module covers how to brainstorm and prioritize risks with your teams, and clarifies why certain risks are the right thing to focus on at certain stages of a project.

Innovation and Portfolio Management

Why don't stage gates work? Why doesn't spending more money on R&D lead to more innovation? How can I drag my company into the future? This module dives into how to understand the ROI of innovation, explain it to stakeholders, and make a case for a dedicated innovation budget using metered funding.

Pitching Innovation Projects

At some point, you're going to need resources and you're going to need to pitch to investors. Whether you're pitching a VC or an internal investment board at a big company, you've got to explain your vision and show some proof, and you have to communicate clearly so your investors focus on the real evidence you've gathered. This module teaches you how to execute an effective pitch plan, and not get sidetracked by style over substance.

Building and Resourcing Teams

How can an innovation project succeed when teams are working half time on the project? In short, they can’t (or it’s at least very difficult!). Participants will engage in a rapid task switching exercise to demonstrate the inefficiency of siloed operations and understand the effectiveness of cross-functional teams.

Customer Segmentation for Simple Sales (B2C)

Demographics used to be a marketer’s only tool, but it's insufficient for early-stage customer discovery, and almost useless for designing user experience. Now we use customer personas to generate an intense focus on early adopters and empathy with end users. In this session, we learn how to identify early customers through segmentation and customer personas.

Setting Personal & Team Goals

Goal-setting is an important step before any major journey. Defining effective goals allows you and your team to make progress and then measure it. This module covers program goal-setting, and how to use these techniques to create a dashboard to keep your innovation project on track.

Project Management & Roadmapping

Managing a series of experiments aimed at discovering a business model is different from managing the execution of a known strategy. The goal in both cases is efficiency, but efficiency-planning changes drastically when you don’t know what the next month holds for your project. This module teaches project management skills aimed at maximizing the time we spend discovering what works and what doesn’t, and how similar companies execute their project management.

Experiment Types: The Real Startup Book

After identifying a clear business question, we need to identify the right method to gather data that will answer that question. This module helps navigate the dozens of experiment and research methods to find the quickest answers to your business questions.

Innovation Ecosystem Design & Metrics

All ecosystems are different, and blindly copying another company’s model can lead to disaster. Each company must take its strengths and weaknesses into account and design an innovation program to complement their vision and resources. This module shows you how to maximize the impact of your innovation program by targeting specific problems in your ecosystem, designing metrics for every obstacle, and converting metrics from vanity to actionable.

Creating Effective Exercises

What’s the most effective way to teach a specific skill or lesson? How much theory should be taught vs hands-on lessons? Using a topic of their choosing, participants will construct exercises in order to demonstrate effective teaching towards an objective and key result. the desired objective. Various teaching patterns will be discussed including failing first vs. the sandwich pattern.

Storyboarding & Metrics

Qualitative data and quantitative data do not exist in opposition. Qualitative data from UXers should not compete with the quantitative data product owners need for their business model. Both are necessary to a complete understanding of where the desirability of the product meets the viability of the business. Storyboarding is a simple way to start integrating both perspectives into a complete picture of how the user experience impacts the business model.

Complex (B2B) Sales Mapping

Complex sales with multiple stakeholders is far more complicated than simple sales for a consumer application. Long sales cycles and complex bidding practices make applying rapid prototyping and lean startup a challenge. This workshop examines ways to break long sales cycles into smaller, more discrete elements that are easier to experiment with and optimize.

Value Proposition & Comprehension Testing

Creating a compelling product or service for the customer starts with a compelling value proposition. If a customer can't understand what's being sold, they won't buy it. In this module, we learn about the different tasks involved in creating a value proposition design.

Usability Testing

Even if your product has all the right features, customers can't love what they can't use. You may have the curse of knowledge. What is obvious to you isn't obvious to your users. By running simple tests in as little as 30 minutes, you can generate valuable data to make your product more usable and lovable.

Innovation Strategy

Define a vision for the future, a path to get there, and effective watchtowers to see when disruption is coming. This module puts your company on the path towards self-disruption, helping you stay on the leading edge of your market and allowing you to get out in front of your competitors -- and stay there.

Innovation Culture & Group Behavior

How can startup culture be maintained when growing the company? How can existing companies bring startup culture into their teams? Maintaining an innovative culture is a competitive advantage. Participants will examine their own work in building an innovation culture and explore how to measure innovation in a larger context.

Leadership Habits

Become a better leader by identifying habits that work and don’t work in startup environments. This module helps you identify your own bad leadership habits and design better habits that work for your team. You will create a plan for collecting feedback on your behaviors, break down good and bad leadership habits in a matrix exercise, and create OKRs for continuous self-improvement

Business Model Design

This module shows you how startups use business models to drive innovation, including how uses of a business model differ between startups seeking product/market fit and larger corporations that have already found it. Learn how to fill out a business model canvas, how to identify risk in your business, and how to prioritize your tasks based on our business assumptions.

Coaching Mindset & Facilitation Techniques

This module goes into the softer side of coaching, with a focus on familiarizing you with facilitation techniques, understanding different team makeups, and learning how to get the most out of your teams. You will practice on tools like our Business Model Canvas to figure out where the team you’re coaching is right now, where you want them to be, and how to get them there.

Financial (and Mission Impact) Modeling

Every entrepreneur needs to understand how to create a basic financial model of their business. This module teaches you the most important elements to model for the most common business types, and to project how your business will grow based on the relationship between specific customer and product metrics and engines of growth.

Effective Survey Design

Learn the dos and don'ts of running surveys to avoid asking bad questions that will lead your product down the wrong path.

Innovation Ecosystem Triage

Innovation Ecosystems are complex, and they challenge some of the traditional models of R&D and innovation. A holistic view of how culture, people, and processes interact is vital to allow a system to disrupt and reinvent itself. This workshop focuses on how to map out your ecosystem and identify obstacles that are putting the brakes on innovation.

Sales Call Training

All customer discovery skills learned so far won’t close a sale. At some point, active listening and discovery of a customer’s problems must result in a well crafted sales call. Participants will learn how to transition from active listening to presenting a solution customer tailored to the customer’s needs.

Stakeholder Management

How can an innovation project avoid typical political hurdles of large companies? We will discuss how different cultures, industry domains, and companies contain groups and individuals with more power than others. We will explore how power manifests itself through position or some other currency of influence such as reputation or prior success. We will address how entrepreneurs and innovation leaders can apply the very same empathy-building skills to “learn about” their customers and engage their relevant stakeholders inside and outside organization or ecosystem. We will learn how such empathy building activities with relevant stakeholders enable definition of aligned goals and metrics and thereby enable mutual value creation for both parties and the overall Innovation Ecosystem.

Advanced Customer Discovery & Debriefing

There is nothing more impactful to your early-stage business model than truly understanding the person you are building for and selling to. This interactive online workshop teaches all you need to know to get out of the building and start talking to your customers. By doing customer discovery, you will understand your customer needs, goals, pains, and aspirations in order to build the right product.

Practical Statistics for Quantitative Experiments

Support your customer discovery, landing page, and comprehension test processes with a basic grasp of applicable statistics. You will learn how to recognize false signals in your experiments, determine sample sizes for experiments, calculate margins of error in your results, and understand the impact of population, sample size, and confidence interval. Ultimately you will be able to identify the winning experiment given a variety of test results.

Marketing Channel Development

How does a company acquire effective sales channels and use them to scale sales & marketing? In this section we will discuss the different ways of scaling a business that has found Product/Market Fit. We will learn how to build a business around a validated customer segment and how to develop distribution channels. We will design experiments around these channels to determine the most effective way to get your product into your customers’ hands. Finally, we’ll learn how to optimize your channels in order to get the most out of your marketing efforts.

Lean, Agile, & UX Principles

Lean Startup was born from a need for companies to innovate in high-risk environments in constantly changing markets. Like its predecessor, Agile Software Development, Lean Startup methodology aims at applying a scientific approach to innovation, identifying business assumptions, and then validating and invalidating business model hypotheses.

Customer Segmentation for Complex Sales (B2B)

Larger organizations require more stakeholders to close a sale. Understanding the differences between Economic Buyers, Technical Buyers, Evangelists, and Users can turn a longshot into a win. Learn the basics of Value Proposition design, and how to adapt them to the complex sales of a B2B environment.

Customer Relationships

Early adopter customers are hard to find and shouldn’t be forgotten by the entrepreneur and the product. A simple follow up can build relationships and community among early adopters and even create evangelists for you. In this session, we will cover effective customer communication techniques and tools to help build those customer relationships.

Team Accountability

Knowing the work that needs to be done on an innovation project is one thing. Knowing how to actually get it done is another. This module walks you through how a team holds itself accountable by agreeing on ways of working to accomplish the tasks necessary for their project to succeed.